Minecraft for Windows 10 Ray Tracing Beta Live on PC

Teach an old game new tricks.

Ray Tracing is all the rage right now, and Minecraft has jumped on the PC bandwagon with their official RTX beta kicking off today. You’ll need a 20-series Nvidia GPU to jump in, but the results are transformative.

Minecraft announced the beta today in a lengthy write-up that shared how it will work. You’ll need to first download the Xbox Insider Hub on your computer, and then the Minecraft Beta client. From there you can download a host of creator-built worlds that are currently using the “Render Dragon” ray tracing suite, or create your own resource packs that will “let you change metallic properties, light emissions, and the roughness of materials.”

As the post states, “with features like direct lighting, emissive surfaces (such as glowstone and lava), realistic shadows, per-pixel emissive lighting, reflections, and transparent materials, you’ll have a whole new way to bring your beautiful worlds to life.” In other words, you’ll have complete control over how the visuals will appear, so you’re not stuck with any sort of preset.

You’ll need at a minimum an RTX 2060, a modern Intel Core i5 or equivalent, and at least 8GB of RAM. You’ll also want the most recent Nvidia drivers, which can be found at GeForce.com/drivers. This is a beta, so don’t expect everything to go off without issue. That said, check out the official trailer below to see just how insanely better Minecraft looks with ray tracing enabled.